Ah i see well i have not got dragon force or a zeidrich yet, im not that far in the game lol
i guess i should wait til disc 3 to try that area out.
I noticed a typo when i updated the hardcore mod, enemy away is now called Enemy Aviod.
Decided to carry on with the storyline, but i got ambused by some red Soldiers and killed me off, so time to try again lol.
After that i managed to start beating the Soldiers, and i beat the boss and finished the submarine mission, then i attempted to try Reno and Rude in the Gelnika, and they destroyed me lol, so much more powerful compared to me.
I carried on with my storyline, went to Rocket Town, and easily stole the Zeidrich off Rude and this boss was not difficult at all.
Then after coming back down from space, i gave the battle arena a go, i actually managed to beat that strange Giant monster, had to keep using Ultima on it and keeping myself alive, the only problem was that i was then against the ochu, used Bad Breath, it hit itself for 30k, then i thought ill need to sleep it with frog song, but by the time my bar was up it hit me for 12k with a normal attack
Tried many fights now in this battle arena, and some of these monsters are just so powerful, i even went up against the Pyramid mobs from the Northern crater, which was just stupid to be honest, i was in Mini, had poison, no accessory, no magic, no items, and all i really had was Beta or an Omnislash, figured i would do the limit break for the laugh because i knew what was coming... Instant death
I have only managed to beat this battle arena once, with just pure luck, at this point of the game i do not think its possible to get W-Summon, i guess its something i should come back to later on, like Typhon, the materia caves, and the Reno and Rude fight on the crashed ship.
Also a note, since reinstalling my ff7, and picking the right settings in my config, i do not seem to be getting crashes anymore, i did not get one single crash in the battle arena.
Edit: Since last night i been levelling and i just tried the Typhon boss again, with no dragon force, but i used Barrett as a tank and give him Zeidrich and Peace ring, then used Cloud and Vincent(highest magic) to be supports, keeping barrett hasted, regen and wall.
This was still a scrappy fight, barrett died a number of times, but i kept bringing him back, and i used Vincents limit half way through so the boss would get interested in him, this was a good strategy because now i was treating barrett and vincent like tanks, the boss has trouble beating Death gigas, i managed to beat the pet and carried on from there counter attacking and reviving.
Then i had a bug again, i think the boss could not figure out who had the most enmity, so it decided to attack itself, it hit itself for 30k per hit, two times in a row and then died.
I think i was going to win the fight anyways, so i would say the earliest point of been able to kill this boss is just after defeating the Diamond Weapon at the end of disc 2, as then your assure of having the right equipment and enough counter attack materia to survive this fight.
By the way, the Diamond weapon fight was a real challenge too, i did not survive the first time round just because i did not foresee the amount of status effects and damage it can do, its a challenge but beatable, which is awesome
Edit2: I have some more feedback for you, done quite a bit so far today.
Ultimate Weapon fights have been done well, it took a while to beat this for 2 reasons.
1) It kept going over Midgar, at this point of the game there is a cutscene if you go over it, so i had to keep restarting the game.
2) Hard to find it, i wish this thing had a marker on the map so it dont take forever to do this part of the game.
Managed to get Circlet, Shadow Flare and Ultima Weapon after a long while chasing this around the world.
Yes i know those points cannot be changed in the hardcore mod, but they still annoy me
Went back to the Blue turtle, and got beat, i had a decent setup but in the end it just spammed Contain magics and i could not do much, guess this is a disc 3 fight.
My opinion is that i dont like the name of the move it does called "Hyper Ether", it should be called something like Refresh or Mana Rejuvenation, as no monsters in FF7 use Ethers, there is no item called Hyper Ether, and Turbo Ethers do the same effect anyway.
I tried the Mime materia fight, and i got beat there too, on the final stage, i tried my best to beat the back 2 but in the end i got overpowered, i did not know what to expect from this fight, and i believe ill have a much better strategy the next time around, it looks beatable.
Next i went the HPMP Swap and MegaAll(!) materia fight, this took me forever to kill, my dad and my sister watched me do this fight for a good 30-40 minutes, and was in awe of the pure battle i had, although this fight was great, it had flaws in it, mainly this one.
It does a move in the final form, cannot remember what its called but it controls the characters and makes them attack other players, this is not so bad when you got the normal characters, but when you turn Vincent into a Limit break.... I used Death Gigas and whenever it did the move on him, it would take him a longtime to attack whoever it was, there was no animation but he turned to whoever he would attack, and this was the main reason why it took so long.
I really liked how many enemy skills this had, im disappointed i did not bring all 3 of my enemy skill materias to the fight, i had 2 of them though and learned a couple of things.
One last thing is i noticed it does a move sort of like death, really strange name what the hell does it mean, and what does this move actually do, sometimes it took me to low hp, and one time it just killed Vincent straight away??
Im going to attempt the Knights of the Round cave next, and win or lose, ill attempt the Mime and Double Magic fight after that, as i think its possible and would be great to have.
Edit3: Attempted the Knights of the Round boss, and had no chance against this, and i laughed at just how quick it managed to kill my characters, then i attempted the Mime boss again two times but i realize that cover does not seem to work in this fight, and its difficult to beat the last stage of this fight.
I think ill attempt the battle arena again (at level 96 Cloud) and try to get W-Summon, if i cannot do this then i strongly believe the battle arena is not beatable on disc 2 (unless your really lucky and get the right monsters)
Attempting the arena once again, i have Ultima Weapon, Zeidrich and Ribbon, but this is still difficult, i will note the reasons why.
Scene 617 is impossible, if fight 6 is the 2 pyramids they are not beatable.
If fight 6 is not the pyramids, fight 7 is the Ochu which was impossible, i lost my accessory by accident.
Pollen > Whip sting > Death
3rd attempt on this i lost to the Griffon, thanks to l2 confu having a mind of its own.
Outside the battle arena, this move can be broken by the player confused, by attacking themselves.
2 out of 3 times, in the battle arena, Cloud has not broken confusion by hitting himself, and kept hitting himself til death.
1 out 3 times, in the battle arena, Cloud did break the confusion by hitting himself, on the first hit of the 4x cut.
He carried onto do his last 3 attacks on the griffon. This move is buggy, i do not understand it.
4th attempt on this scene, i noticed the mob which does Toxic barf, actually attacked another mob and killed it, after this fight i got the pyramids on fight 6 and died instantly.
Scene 614 is pretty easy, having 4x cut with Ultima Weapon for this is great, and the last boss is the Sandworm.
Scene 613 has the wizard which can do Damnation, and no defense against it, still waiting to do this again
Scene 182 is ok, apart from the last boss is the Viper Breath mob, putting this is in bio and having dream powders from Mideel is a must have.
Scene 609 can be pretty hard, specially if you and up against the ghost ship with no materia, an Omnislash will not kill it and it does 3-4k per hit and can double attack.
Second time i did this i got the Ochu as the last, and its practically impossible, the Whip Sting still does 12k damage with a Ziedrich on.
Unless Omnislash is ready, its virtually impossible, think i only beaten this once.
Scene 606 did not seem too difficult, ended with the Sandworm again.
Second time i tried this i got the Adamantoise on second battle, only way i could kill was by using ???? at low hp
Did not help for the next fight as i did Full Cure, and it missed :( I really do not like it when Full Cure and Mighty Guard miss the character.
One time on this i managed to get an awesome 12000 BP, as i had lost all my materia on the way to the sandworm, i was in slow for the last fight and having to use Hi potions to keep my hp up(running out of X potions) and finished with Omnislash.
Scene 604 is pretty hard, specially with the new giant on fight 6, (do not get why it can be poisoned, when it takes 0 damage)
Then you run straight into the ghost ship, i only had 4k max hp at this point and had no chance.
Second time trying this i found it really easy, ended with the Sandworm, no difficult mobs at all.
Scene 610 was not too difficult, but i did manage to get the right choices between fights, the 6th fight was the giant which is not so bad when you got 18k hp and lots of MP ready.
After i beat this i had the ghost ship, i noticed it did not do that annoying move when it throws you out, managed to kill it with normal attacks while using White wind to stay alive.
Win/Loss record: 8/9
BP: 65000As you can see, i eventually got my W-Summon materia on disc 2, it was difficult in the beginning, and some scenes are pretty much impossible, but in the end with the correct scenes and patience, its possible
Went to chocobos for Megalixers, Elixirs, GP for X-potions and Turbo Ethers, and to try get Magic Counter again, unluckily Magic counter materia is very rare and the 4 or 5 times i have seen it, out of dozens of races, it never wants to drop for me
Time to finish this disc off, Midgar here i come!
Edit4: This part is dedicated to the return to Midgar, this part has been done very well but there are some nasty parts too which needs some work.
Went into this with a party of Cloud Yuffie and Tifa all wielding Ultimate weapons, changed to Cloud Barrett and Vincent at the save point before Hojo.
Going to post what i think about each monster i encountered so far in this part of the game:
Behemoth - This is much tougher, something which looks this bad and the history behind it, im surprised this is not a boss at some point in the game.
This monster is used so often in the FF series, after killing this twice i was hoping not to run into this again.
Crazy saw - Has a ton of HP now, i like the toughness.
Cromwell - This seemed like one of the weakest monsters i could find.
Eagle Gun - Loved this addition! Managed to get a second warriors bangle, and the fight was fun.
Grosspanzer - Takes off a lot more damage then before, still it seems like an easy fight.
Heli Gunner - I was surprised to see two of these, was a good fight and managed to get a Fourth Bracelet off one, which is great because i like the stats on it.
This is outdated by the Zeidrich and Mystiles at this point of the game.
Manhole - Immune to Bad Breath, still dont seem too bad.
Maximum Kimaira - After Bad breath, this is easy due to the Silence.
Soldier:1st - I hate these a lot, i encountered them in a back attack, and they were taking off 7-10k per hit off my players, although i had zeidrichs and mystile on.
They attack very fast and there was no way i could defend against them, Bad breath does not work at all.
This needs sorting out because its not good how easily they can kill level 90+ characters.
Xcannon - I hate this too, it stops everybody, does the countdown, and it killed barrett every single time, as he was the only one without a ziedrich.
Its too fast to take any decent damage off it between Dragon cannons, i only managed to kill this with an Omnislash, Cloud only had 3k left and my party was dead, annoying fight.
Any other monsters i encountered were pretty cool, had no problems with them and liked the difficulty, now onto the bosses.
The Turks - First time fighting these i died straight away, Elenas move wiped out 2 of my guys then Cloud got finished off, so i restarted and tried again with a slightly different setup.
Second time round i used Mug(all) and got all 3 items in one swing from Yuffie, then i managed to have an epic battle against these 3, luckily the fight is not a long one, but its easy to get killed if not prepared for what they can do.
Proud Clod - This fight was crazy, it was intense and Proud Clod is very strong, i really believe the only reason why i did not die on my first attempt, was because it attacked itself a few times.
One time it was while Cloud was the only character alive with barely no HP, i was expecting to die right there, but it attacked itself and i managed to come back and finish him off.
This battle needs work, the bug is not cool, and i believe its way too strong for level 90+ if it did not have the bug.
Theo Locke and Venus - I am a big fan of these fights, the first two were awesome and were very well done, on this fight i noticed a couple of things, mainly how Venus needs to be kept asleep and killed first.
Hellmasker is great against these, he does Nightmare and puts Venus and Theo in Mini which is a great help.
In the dialogue at the start, i noticed a typo, one of them says "uss" when the correct word would be "us", small mistake but very noticeable.
I beat these first, and made a separate save, had a feeling that these are holding a good item, and i was right when i tried again, using Barret to Mug(all) i managed to get an Elixir, Safety Bit and a Mystile!
This helps so much as now its not required for me to use the glitch in the north crater to get 2 Mystiles.
Hojo - This was a challenging and fun fight, protecting against stop and making sure you got some form of tank for the second form is a must to winning this.
Hojos last form was crazy on its combo, great job on this!
